At the heart of the campaign that led Britain to vote to leave the European Union was a desire to regain independence lost amid a globalized world. It's the same kind of feeling that Donald Trump rode to become the presumptive Republican nominee in the U.S., where he campaigns to put "America first" and "make America great again."

''This isn't the country I remember from growing up. I don't know exactly what happens next. I don't think anybody does. But I really feel like we needed something different, because this isn't working," "Absolutely wonderful, best news ever. We want England — or Great Britain — to come back how it was years ago, and it's going the way that we want it to go,"

Incidentally, the late Lee Kuan Yew predicted the break up of the European Union back in 2011. In his book, he said "Integration holds great promise apart from just peace. A Europe that achieves singularity in purpose would have much greater economic clout and, more significantly, a much bigger voice in international affairs. Put simply, it would be a more powerful Europe. If the Europeans were to deepen its integration efforts and go on to have one finance minister, and perhaps even to having one foreign minister and one defence minister, their augmentation in hard-power terms would be enormous. Consider the people of the United States of America. They are basically Europeans who have been transferred to another continent and have dropped their tribal loyalties and their different languages. If Europe integrates to the same extent and becomes the United States of Europe, there is nothing the Americans can do which they cannot do. Europe as one entity is more populous than America (500 million versus 310 million) and has an economy one-sixth larger than America's. Such a Europe would certainly be in the running for the world's leading superpower.

Alas, all the signs point to the impossibility of integration. They have so far failed to make a single currency work and are not likely to progress to a single foreign policy stance or a single military. They have individual histories, each going back many centuries. Each nation is proud of its own traditions. Above all, they want to keep their languages alive - there is glory and literature behind it. America decided to start afresh and create a new literature, but Europe will not be able to do so. Even though English is already the second language in all the other countries, those on Continental Europe will never accept it as the single working language.

What then will be Europe's place in the world? They will be smaller players on the international stage. In the face of dominance by the major powers such as the US and China, and maybe later on, India, Europe will be reduced to the role of supporting actor. Most of the European countries will be treated - quite rightly - as ordinary small states. Germany might be able to carry its weight alone, thanks to its population and its economic success, although it will not want to raise its head above the parapet because it is still filled with guilt for having killed six million Jews during the Holocaust. The British will retain some influence because of their special transatlantic relationship with America." "I write more in sorrow than in derision about Europe's inevitable decline. I do not want to run Europe down. The Europeans are a very civilised people."

The working class in Britain is being left behind, as they are (almost) everywhere else in the developed world. However, in Britain's case, it is not due to bad trade deals or globalization. Manufacturing accounts for just 10% of Britain's economy and 8% of employment. In fact, the car industry, which is the poster boy of UK manufacturing is enjoying what’s widely described as a “renaissance”. Britain's economy is dependent on trading and finance (a legacy of their historical empire) and they also have Scotland, with its North Sea oil. Britain is kinda a "nation of shopkeepers", and globalization hasn't affected their livelihood directly.

Unlike America, Britain is a welfare state, practicing e.g. truly socialized medicine. Healthcare is provided by a single payer — the British government — and is funded by the taxpayer. All appointments and treatments are free to the patient (though paid for through taxes), as are almost all prescription drugs. The welfare benefits in the UK are better than other European countries, such that there are large groups of immigrants camped in parts France waiting for any opportunity to cross into Britain.

However, unlike America, which has printed truckloads of money, Britain's Conservative government has been prudent by practicing extreme austerity for years. This means that many public services have been cut a great deal - some of them up to 30 percent.

At the same time, the population has grown because of migration and, unlike Germany, a higher birth rate. For example, it has led to the fact the public health sector has become poorer. Waiting times in doctors' offices and hospitals have become longer. Transfer payments have been slashed. Local and long-distance public transport systems have also felt the cuts. Furthermore, actual earnings on the entire income scale have been in great decline for years after the recession. They were - and still are - hard times for people, especially for those who are at the lower part of the income scale. And a particularly high number are in the north of Great Britain.

Before the referendum campaign, the Conservative government partly made the EU responsible for this development. This was strongly supported by the British press, 70 percent of which was for the "Leave" vote. If you have been confronted with this for five or six years - and reports on Europe were not positive before the Great Recession - then a very strong anti-European image is being created. And it was abundantly exploited by the exit camp.

Economic reality played no role in this referendum. It was an emotional decision. This has to do with the fact that, in the past seven or eight years, a large portion of the population has seen itself as losing out. And they consider the establishment - whoever that is - as responsible for this. Many voted to leave as a protest against the government.

That's explains the problem; but what would have been a solution? Obviously whatever the previous government was doing wasn't helping actual earnings on the entire income scale, especially for those who are at the lower part of the income scale.

The question of sovereignty in the neo-liberal age is central to the range of issues raised by EU membership. How does a nation, the largest democratic unit the West can claim, exercise its will in a world where capital can roam free and traders can undermine the will of the people by simply shifting resources to countries where labor is cheaper and unions are weaker?

The trouble is Britain’s EU membership did not address these dilemmas one way or another, because while we could opt out of the EU we could not opt out of global capital. So as the markets tanked, the pound nosedived, and our credit rating was downgraded, we were treated to a crash course in what ‘getting your country back’ really means in a system guided by profit not patriotism. The EU, at least, came with a patina of social democratic measures: labor protections, a court of justice, some environmental regulation, and the free movement of people.

Leave did well in Labor heartlands where people felt they had been left behind. When told things would get worse if we left the EU, they wondered how bad could it get. So while the EU was on the ballot, the verdict was ultimately against a system that they felt had left them behind. The fact that all the major parties, leading economists, and financial institutions backed Remain merely emphasized the point. The stewards of the very system that is crushing people said do one thing, so they did another.

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Bud Meyers writes about the economy, politics, Social Security, corporate outsourcing, labor statistics, the REAL unemployment rate, taxes and tax evasion, government and corporate corruption, and the plight of the long-term unemployed.